Wildflower identification game changer!

I have the Collins wildflower guide and the Wildflower key. Both excellent, but I have all too often resorted to skimming through the pages looking for a pictorial match!

Or even worse, going straight to a photo, and onto inaturalist, which is becoming very lazy and in danger of teaching me nothing along the way.

My problem is that the keys, especially the initial key, in both books ask questions that I have no idea what the answer is! Once I'm at the right family, then I'm happy to follow the text and work the species out.

So I stumbled across the "Pocket guide to wildflower families"

So far, this seems to answer my prayers, asking simpler questions in order to focus me into the right area of the field guides. It also has page references for the relevant pages of the main field guides.

So far, so good with a fairly straightforward path through the Q&A to one of my more common garden flowers, confirmed as Cleavers!

Hopefully onto some more challenges in the coming month, and a further challenge to myself to only use inaturalist/ obsidentify to confirm my own identification.